Last week, a group of 8 volunteers from the Air Force visited Irvine to help out with two important projects.
Four volunteers worked on relocating the sand play area in the Outdoor Classroom. The feature consists of two sand boxes (made from re-purposed horse troughs) and is used frequently by Irvine’s preschool students and visiting members. In their initial location, whenever there were heavy rains, the troughs would flood and sand would be carried out of the classroom, causing drainage issues and negatively impacting soil quality downstream.
The group dug up the two troughs and dug two 2-foot holes to re-bury them in another area of the Outdoor Classroom, farther from the drainage channel. As you can see in the photos below, an added benefit to this project was getting the troughs buried deeper in the ground, making the sand boxes much more accessible for students!
The other half of the group worked on constructing a new vermicompost bin by the picnic area. Vermicomposting is the process of composting with worms! Skyla Steele, Irvine’s fantastic Conservation Corps volunteer, designed the bin as a part of her intern capstone project. This bin will be utilized by visitors to Irvine, and has several different educational components- more details to come in a future blog post!
A HUGE thanks to the Air Force for all of their hard work!
